


A Thin Veneer

by ApophisOfficer



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Bc the taking off of the mask wouldn't let me go, Child Abuse, Drabble, Gen, Past Child Abuse, Short One Shot, aka unnecessarily and completely preventably, my dude you later had a kid that could see ghosts, no beta we die like men, of course there were consequences to dramatically taking the mask off to do a mass murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:41:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26219524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApophisOfficer/pseuds/ApophisOfficer
Summary: "You know what? If we're going to do this, take off the mask. I'm sick of speaking to latex or whatever it is."
Relationships: The Hargreeves Family
Comments: 37
Kudos: 265





	A Thin Veneer

Dinner with dad who wasn’t their dad for the second time felt no less harrowing than it did in 1963. Possibly worse, this Reginald Hargreeves had actively sought out children of different genders and ethnic groups to make sure he didn’t get any of them. Knowing your last impression had literally gotten you unadopted was…. A weight that hung heavy in the room. 

Then Klaus opened his mouth.

"You know what? If we're going to do this, take off the mask. I'm sick of speaking to latex or whatever it is."

The words elicited a surprisingly strong reaction from their not-father. His eyes widening and then narrowing in suspicion as his brows furrowed. Whatever Klaus was talking about might actually mean something. 

“I don’t know what you mean.” Every single one of them could hear the tension in the words, years of paying careful attention to avoid punishment attuning them to every shift of the man’s moods. 

Klaus leaned in, his smile icy and eyes unfamiliarly cold as he cooly said, “Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead, unless you have a medium kid. Then your go-to method doesn’t really work so well.”

And that implied  _ a lot _ , to say the least. First, that dad’s go to method for secret keeping was murder. Second, Klaus would have easily bypassed said method and jeopardized every secret their father had ever kept. Third, there is no timeline in which this would not have occurred to dear old Reggie the moment Klaus started speaking to the dead. 

Whatever was about to come out was not going to be good and they couldn’t even hold the Reginald who had done it responsible because this man had done nothing to them except decided he didn’t want them. Timeline shit. They would never again see the man that raised them. Only this doppelgänger that might have been.

Not that it was likely he’d been a good father to these new kids, just bad in entirely new ways. 

Despite these, the next words out of Faux Reggie’s mouth surprised them all, even Klaus who had not expected the man to give in so easily, “I see, and I would say that given your “siblings” reactions, you never told them what you know.”

Klaus stopped moving in a way that was unfamiliar, no twitching hands or slouch to be found even as he casually threw out, “The only time I brought it up you broke my jaw to keep me quiet and then threw me down the stairs to cover it up. I couldn’t talk for eight weeks, during which you made it incredibly clear what the consequences for spilling the beans would be.”

_ Fuck. _

Five took a moment to lament his own brother’s inability to share anything in a less than utterly dramatic fashion as Diego began to gouge the table with his dinner knife and Allison snarled towards the head of the table. It was fucked up, don’t get him wrong, but they really could have used some forewarning about this. At least Luther and Vanya had gone still, probably processing the words still. They couldn’t kill Hargreeves, not yet. They needed more time. 

Reginald leaned back in his seat, eyes thoughtful, “Sensible, something like this in the hands of a child would be incredibly dangerous.”

Or they could kill him right here, right now, consequences be damned. Five would help. 

Allison opened her mouth, ready to end the bastard’s life with only words, but cut off as the man grabbed the nape of his own neck and  _ peeled. _

Skin came free, a mask slipping off easily as if it had never really been attached in the first place. Latex and yet clearly not because latex could never mimic human skin movement that well. From beneath emerged an inhuman face. 

It was strange, skin pale and spikes in places no human had them. 

Only Vanya was able to tear her eyes from the sight, almost trying to unsee it before he life could actually get any weirder. Her eyes landed on Klaus who hadn’t broken eye contact with Reginald the entire time, his face unmoved by the reveal. 

Dad was an alien, and Klaus had known. 

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> You cannot tell me that Reginald dramatically took his mask off to violently kill a bunch of people at the end of season 2 and that didn't come back to bite him when one of his kids turned out to be a medium in the other timeline.
> 
> Not my best work but I had to get it out, ya know?


End file.
